Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Lifer

"Hi there,

Thank you for your payment of 75.00 GBP for LOTRO.

Your game time has been extended accordingly, and your next payment is due before 01/01/70."

Codemasters welcome back week hooked me after all despite my misgivings about timing. I logged on last Monday to say hello to my friends in the kinship and here I am a week later with almost 30 hours of playtime under my belt. I have left Lotro twice before and have come back to the game each time after a few months break so I decided that the £75 lifetime subscription was too good a deal to turn down.

I do have some misgivings. I really don't want to get back into playing one game all day every day. However fellow bloggers like Tipa, Van Hemlock and Wilhelm2451 have shown that it is possible to play an mmo and enjoy it on a less than exclusive basis and this is what I hope to do. I know this will require a certain amount of discipline and I also realise that this almost certainly means that I will miss out on certain parts of the game. I probably won't be able to participate in raiding. I will have to accept that my characters will never have uber gear and won't be able to maximise their stats. So be it. I will try to play the parts of the game I enjoy and see how far it takes me.

Since I left Lotro the end game has gotten a lot more serious. The advent of radiance gear as a prerequisite to raiding has created a definite progression path for Raiding. Casual players can no longer sign up for a raid and hope to get a spot. I am lucky enough to be in a well organised casual friendly kinship but it is very noticeable that the more experienced players are now focussed on progression. It can be hard to balance that with a casual friendly ethos but I think the kinship is strong enough and the players mature enough to work through it. As a confirmed casual player I will do my best not to upset things and try not to leech off the more committed players.

I had a Trial Account (got a key through PC Gamer) but never actually had the full game. I wonder if that grants me access to the Lifetime subscription for returning subscribers? Or if I actually needed to be a legitimate subscriber...

my kin is starting to get progression minded too. I used to get my panties ina twist about that and want to keep things casual but now I see that its alright if they are on all the time and I am not, and occasionally I schedule instance runs and do fun things and sometimes maybe I'll get radiance gear but its ok if I don't. The pressure isn't on since I know the raid will be gone the next time they expand the game another 10 levels. It will still be available to run but it'll be "gone" in the sense that nobody will want to run it anymore like the rift now. So I'd like to run it now while its relevant and fun but at least I can run the other dungeons which, frankly, are plenty hard, especially the ones in the foundations of stone.

Hello Wilhelm, Capn John and Thallian. Don't know if the special deal is available in the USA but Codemasters never advertised it in Europe, people just found it when they logged in to pay a subscription. It might be worth logging in to your account and checking what's on offer.